1. Technical Field
The invention relates to a sheathing material.
2. Background Art
A variety of sheathing materials are attached to a wire harness for a vehicle, for example. As the sheathing material, a corrugated tube that has high wear resistance and can be freely bent to follow an arranging path is used in many cases (for example, refer to JP-A-10-136531).
The corrugated tube has a bellows shape of which concavo-convex portions having large and small diameters are alternately formed in an axis line direction. Thereby, the wire harness inserted therein has a reduced contact area with other members due to the concave and convex portions and has an increased distance from the other members due to the convex portions, so that it delays a damage of an electric wire covering, for example.
In addition, a cylindrical sheathing material for which linearity retention is required, a sheathing material having a hole through which a branch harness is drawn out, a protector having impact resistance and the like may be compositely attached to the wire harness.
When the wear resistance, the linearity, the bendability (flexibility) and the electric wire branch are required by other portions of the wire harness, a variety of members are mounted to the sheathing material in conformity to the requirements. As a result, the number of components and the processing man-hour are increased.
Also, the corrugated tube has the high wear resistance and bendability but has an unevenness shape. Hence, when carrying the long corrugated tube with being wound, a volume thereof is increased to increase the logistics cost.
Regarding this, a sheathing material has been suggested in which a sheath material (a sheet base material) having a sheet shape is rolled into a cylindrical shape to thus reduce the logistics cost (for example, refer to JP-A-2003-259528).
That is, since the sheath material having a sheet shape can be conveyed with being stacked, a volume thereof is not increased, so that the conveying efficiency thereof is high. For this reason, it is also considered to convey the corrugated tube in a form of a corrugated plate sheet having concave and convex portions alternately arranged and then to roll the same into a cylindrical shape.
Incidentally, when it is intended to configure the bellow-shaped corrugated tube from the sheet base material, the corrugated plate sheet having concave and convex portions alternately arranged should be rolled into a cylindrical shape so that the concave and convex portions are alternately arranged in a tube axis line direction. Thereby, the concave and convex portions exhibit the structural stiffness, so that it is difficult to manufacture a freely bendable corrugated tube.
Hence, according to the sheathing material disclosed in JP-A-2003-259528, a flat plate-shaped sheath material is provided with a thin hinge part continuing in an X direction over the concave and convex portions and the thin hinge part is formed at a predetermined pitch in a Y direction, so that the sheathing material is wound in the Y direction to form a circular ring shape. However, it is difficult to continuously mold the concavo-convex shaped corrugated plate sheet having the thin hinge part by a low-price processing method such as embossing processing, so that the manufacturing cost is increased.
The invention has been made keeping in mind the above situations, and an object of the invention is to provide a sheathing material capable of reducing the manufacturing and logistics costs.